Last Tuesday, city councillor Mike Layton proclaimed that Toronto should become “a leading live-music destination.” On its surface, the premise makes sense: Why not use the fame of Feist, Drake et al. to increase Toronto’s tourism clout? But it takes more than pop acts to give a city real musical soul. Herewith, our tribute to Toronto’s DIY music educators, the local rock stars who are helping make Layton’s dream come true.

Goldman, who manages the brunch spot Aunties & Uncles, was feeling blue last winter. “When I was 20, I went out all the time, but now I’m 35 and I don’t meet anyone, I don’t make any new friends,” he says. The remedy to this began as a loosely affiliated collection of singers with a jokey Facebook page and has grown into a 150-voice choir. The group gathers twice a week at the bar No One Writes to the Colonel, sings tunes by acts such as Crowded House and takes the music and the fun seriously.

“People use the choir to meet people, hook up, sing, get a job or come out of depression,” says Goldman, who denies his club is attracting reflective attention from Glee. “Glee is touring, has hits and releases albums; we’re just about getting out of the house,” Goldman says. “Singing helps let your guard down. Besides, I don’t want to sit in a bar and hope to hang out with someone cool.”

Favourite local act? “Rush. They’re not the best-looking guys and Toronto didn’t give them any help when they started, but they never did what anyone told them — and their musicianship rocks.”

This company-in-residence at the Toronto Centre for the Arts has been around for a quarter century, and in that time has taught 1,000 young singers to appreciate music. “The first time a parent told me that her daughter had lined up her dolls and was conducting them was astounding,” says Beaupré, whose chorus currently counts 200 members. I suddenly realized that I could be a role model to young girls.”

According to Beaupré, Toronto already is a stellar live music city. In the future, she’d like to see our Mayor out at more shows. “He needs to go to rehearsals of choirs, bands and orchestras. He should listen to the rehearsals, then talk to the membership, asking them how they feel,” Beaupré says. “Infrastructure is important, but music, art and literature are the expression of the soul.”

Favourite local act? “Elmer Iseler. One of my most memorable early experiences with Elmer was my first read-through of Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus. When we finished, I felt like the song had personally been laid out for me, exactly as Byrd had felt it, from his heart.”

Juno-winner Melanie Doane is from Halifax, where her father received the Order of Canada for bringing music programs into schools. “I grew up with this at my fingertips,” says Doane, a mother of two currently appearing in the play War Horse. “After moving to Toronto, my kids had a wonderful music teacher, but no ukulele program. I decided to volunteer.”

Her work has led to a new music program in eight public elementary schools, where thousands of children in grades three to five use the ukulele as a gateway to musicianship. “When I don’t have the ability to express myself, I pick up an instrument,” Doane says. “In five minutes, I can see who needs this. Some people need music like food and I’m one of them. Those are the ones I’m doing this for.”

Favourite local act? “Lights, of course Feist, also Andrew Burashko, who does such great work at the Art of Time. Emilie-Claire Barlow, Sarah Slean — chops up the ying-yang — and Barenaked Ladies. It’s the real deal, Toronto’s music scene.”

Aaron Lynett/National PostPiano instructor Tiffany Hanus, left, works with Tess Radigan at the Toronto Institute for the Enjoyment of Music on Queen Street West.

“The idea is to have a positive place to support music,” says Goldbach, a musician who opened his music emporium in 2009. “The school isn’t particular to a type of music as much as it’s particular to a vibe.” That vibe is informal, with kids and adults learning to play everything from drums to trombone. There are string instruments, saxophones and recorders; the clientele in the Queen West classroom is equally diverse.

“We get mothers with their babies and one of my favourite students is a woman in her seventies learning the cello,” says Goldbach, crediting an older brother with introducing him to music when he was four. “People ask me if I feel like Clark Kent turning into Superman when I step onstage at El Mocambo, but they get it backwards: I’m Superman when I’m here.”

Favourite local act? “Historically, Glenn Gould, one of the most important musicians of the 20th century, and Oscar Peterson. Today, Broken Social Scene. They did a lot for this town.”

There were many ripple effects of Toronto’s Summer of the Gun, that infamous 2007 season when violence appeared to spiral out of control. “I made a decision — I’ll do whatever I can to change one thing into another thing,” says Hammer, who soon after opened his first music class at Derry Down PS, at Keele and Finch. “Violence and violins almost sound the same. Can one thing wipe the other away?”

Born in Hungary and schooled in Israel, Hammer says he used music as a refuge from war. “There was violence around me and whenever I began to despair, I’d go into my room and practice,” Hammer says. “It’s how I remained relatively sane.”

The Hammer Band offers instruction at 15 schools around Jane and Finch and Victoria Park and Hammer estimates there are currently 300 members of his band. He wants to give back that feeling of safety that music gave him as a child. “Kids join a gang because they want to belong and feel like they don’t have any options,” says Hammer, whose students will be performing at Brookview Middle School on April 25. “We want music to be that other option. It works. It saved me.”

Favourite local act? “Jackie Richardson. The way she turns a phrase makes my insides jump with excitement; moves molecules.”

On Thursday morning at Oakdale Park Middle School, Bailey, Jenny and Jhanoi, who are all in Grade 6, said their teacher turned off the lights in their classroom and told them to lie on the floor.

“She said that if the gunman came into the room he would think we were already dead,” said Jenny, standing next to a yellow plastic slide at the Oakdale Community Centre, across from her school.

“I asked the teacher, ‘Is this a drill?’” said Bailey. “I was scared when they said it was serious. There was a lawnmower that kept going by and droning, and it was scary. We were all in the corner of the classroom. It was dark and quiet.”

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Teachers “locked down” this public middle school, for grades six through eight, at about 10 a.m., after gunshots rang out. A tall young male, who was standing around waiting, began firing shots.

Two people were taken to hospital, a 19-year-old male suffering multiple bullet wounds to the abdomen, and a 16-year-old female who was shot once in the foot. She was not likely an intended target, said Toronto Police Inspector Randy Carter, as she was standing on the opposite side of the street from the male victim.

“I understand that the adult victim was shot when he was leaving the community centre,” said Insp. Carter during a news conference. “The suspect was standing around waiting, and left in a [silver] vehicle.”

Grandravine Drive begins in the east at Keele Street in the city’s University Heights neighbourhood, named for its proximity to York University, and for most of its length it is a lovely thoroughfare, winding past split-level 1960s bungalows and through parkland, where fall leaves yesterday rustled in the grass. At the drive’s west end, just before Jane Street, it reaches Oakdale Park, and the bungalows give way to two-storey boxes in off-white brick, built, as if intentionally, to make their occupants feel low self-worth. The boxes have parking lots in front, an area for dumpsters, and street addresses painted in block black letters on rusting white signs screwed to the brick. A sign from Toronto Community Housing warns of video surveillance.

On Thursday afternoon 10 police cars, and a truck from the police forensic investigation unit, lined Grandravine in front of the school, and yellow police tape stopped parents from crossing to pick up their children; they had to go around the community centre to a back entrance of the school, when the last bell rang. An employee of the city-owned community centre said he and his supervisor decided to shut the centre for the day.

“Some of the bullets hit the gym, and there is a possibility one of the attackers came through the community centre,” the city employee told me.

Andre Ewas, Carlos Khoshou and Kenneth Martinez, who are all 15, had headed over to the community centre to play basketball after school. They found the door locked. It did not surprise them; they said violence is commonplace in this neighbourhood. They all shared stories of muggings.

“This is nothing out of the ordinary to me,” said Carlos, who lives in an apartment building next to the school, and attends St. Basils the Great Catholic Secondary School. “The metro housing is bad… Believe me, if I could leave this area, I would.”

“Here in this neighbourhood,” Kenneth added, “people don’t shoot fireworks into the air on Canada Day. They shoot them at each other.”

A mom told me she moved here from “one of the Caribbean islands” 11 years ago. As she waited for her daughter, she said, “I can’t believe what’s happening in this neighbourhood. I think for now it is getting worse. Maybe there are lots of youth who are unemployed and have nothing to do. We need more police force around visiting the area more often.”

Ward 9 Councillor Maria Augimeri visited the area Thursday and said Oakdale has been working to shed the stigma of being a violent area. “The community has turned itself around, this is a one-off [and] it could happen anywhere…. It doesn’t look like it was a person from the community,” she said, adding that police statistics from 31 Division show the crime rate is down.

Alicia Bartholomew, a community activist and member of Jane and Finch On The Move, said a decision was made Wednesday to start a community safety group in Oakdale region. “We will have a resident watch, so if anyone has any concerns they can come to us,” she said.

Such efforts are worthy. Just as worthy would be an effort to replace the off-white brick social-housing boxes with something fit for our citizenry. That would seem a better investment than sending around a fleet of police cruisers to an area that is so used to seeing them already.

November 3, 2011 — Our panel wonders whether Toronto’s most notorious neighbourhood will ever change; Adelaide and Richmond will share the road with cyclists; and how the city’s human rights office could possibly justify looking into a complaint about the presence, as memorabilia, of a former mayoral candidate’s campaign poster.

After a recent spate of violence, York University is facing fresh calls to address the safety of students living in a dense pocket of housing just south of the school’s campus.

The Village at York University, where international student Qian Liu was found dead in her home last month, came under scrutiny again last week after a York student was sexually assaulted inside the school; the suspect in that case was also seen following two women home on the outskirts of the Village, just east of the notorious Jane-Finch corridor.

York stepped up security on campus in the wake of the latest attack, spokesman Wallace Pidgeon said, but the Village presents a unique problem. Packed with illegal student housing units, the area is outside the school’s jurisdiction, preventing York from deploying its own security team or setting up emergency phones. Students, growing increasingly frustrated by the school’s response, are calling on York’s administration to make their concerns a priority at City Hall.

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“The university needs to play a more proactive role in ensuring safety for students who live in that area, not just looking at liability and legal responsibilities,” York Federation of Students president Vanessa Hunt said Monday.

She criticized the school for moving slowly on key initiatives in a 2010 safety audit, including expansion of the school’s shuttle program into Village side streets. Mr. Pidgeon says while all the audit’s recommendations are “being looked at,” it is not clear whether, or when, the outstanding measures will be implemented. The project’s total timeframe is five years.

Ms. Hunt is also riled that the school has failed to offer a formal acknowledgment of responsibility for ensuring student safety in communities adjacent to the school — particularly since York’s code of conduct allows the university to take action when students run afoul of the law, either on or off campus.

“It’s really strange how the university feels they have a responsibility to punish students for their behaviour off campus, yet have no feeling of responsibility for ensuring the safety of students off campus,” Ms. Hunt said.

Mr. Pidgeon says the school is concerned about the safety of all York students, stepping up campus patrols after the incident last week. He pointed to a half-million-dollar increase in security spending in the past year and a host of added safety measures, including hundreds of closed-circuit television cameras.

But off campus, Mr. Pidgeon said, York does not have the same jurisdiction.

“We are working to discuss these concerns with our municipal partners, and we would ask them to be as vigilant as we are,” Mr. Pidgeon said, citing a forum called “Town and Gown” where police, students, faculty and community members can gather to discuss safety issues.

“Much has been done and we acknowledge that there potentially is more to do,” Mr. Pidgeon said.

Councillor Anthony Perruzza (York West), who co-chairs the Town and Gown committee, estimates the populous Village houses between 10,000 and 20,000 people, though the approximately 800 homes were zoned for single families. The city has been fighting an uphill battle to obtain concrete evidence of the illegal student housing units, he said, and is working to find a longer-term regulatory solution.

Asked about the possibility of the city stepping in to improve lighting in the area or install emergency phones, Mr. Perruzza said: “We could take a look at that.”

Police have also been working to strengthen ties with York, and have focused their own resources on the Village specifically in recent months.

“There’s a huge population… It’s always a concern of ours,” 31 Division Detective Sergeant Alan Coulter said. “We direct patrols through that area all the time.”

There’s nobody, but nobody, in politics that has helped out black people more than I have,” quoth Rob Ford on Wednesday night during a mayoral debate at the Jamaican Canadian Association, up Jane-and-Finch way. My jaw dropped slightly, and I checked to make sure my tape recorder was working. It was. He said it. Then I realized I seemed to be the most scandalized person in the room. Many people might assume Mr. Ford would be chased out of a debate like this, but he definitely wasn’t.

Facing off against George Smitherman, Joe Pantalone and Rocco Achampong, I’d say he came close to winning it, and upon reflection it’s not hard to see why.

The question Mr. Ford was answering — from a no-nonsense Jane-Finch resident named Cathy — went like this: “I want to know what you would do for us in this area, especially for our black men who are getting shot down in the street and no one is being held accountable for it. Also, I don’t want to hear nothing about no basketball, no football, no soccer. We have bright, intelligent young people.”

I laughed — not because it was funny, but the way you laugh when an idea you’ve always thought was reasonable is suddenly, convincingly denounced by someone with a totally different perspective: Of course not every young person at Jane and Finch wants to play sports, or is good enough at sports to make a team, let alone get a scholarship to university. Clearly, Coach Ford had no choice but to mention football — and he did — but I thought he carried it off reasonably well.

“A lot of time, kids don’t want to go to school,” he opined, uncontroversially. “So what we have to do is give them a carrot — something to convince them to go to school.” His experience in football, he explained, was just one kind of carrot.

Unfortunately, the secondary schools in Ward 4, which includes Jane-Finch, remain among the very poorest performers in the TDSB, according to the Fraser Institute’s rankings. And though we’ve heard amazingly little about issues of primary concern to the so-called “priority neighbourhoods” — poverty, the state of social housing, joblessness, education or lack thereof, violence — they haven’t gone away.

There were fewer murders in Toronto last year than in any of the previous three years, but there weren’t few; there were 62.

There were more shootings than in any of the previous three years. In August, the three-month moving average unemployment rate in Toronto was 10.1% — nearly 25% above the national average.

You couldn’t listen to the questions being asked on Wednesday night and miss the point. “It takes a healthy village to raise a child,” one audience member observed, referring to the state of social housing. “My village is not healthy.”

The one person who has at least tried to bring these practical issues into the campaign limelight is Mr. Ford, said Mr. Achampong.

He speaks approvingly of Mr. Ford’s standpoint on employment: “The best social program is a job,” as Mr. Achampong puts it. “It’s true.”

One of the biggest cheers Mr. Ford got was when he said he’d hand rental subsidies directly to their recipients and let them live wherever they want, instead of leaving them to the mercies of Toronto Community Housing, which he always calls “the worst landlord in the city.”

Mr. Achampong — whose tune seems to have changed considerably since August, when he called Mr. Ford “wrong-headed,” “backward” and “not qualified to be mayor” — is similarly complimentary of Mr. Ford’s football coaching career. “In academia, we sit around and have long conversations on causes and glorify each other to the point of near-deification. But who’s doing something for people?” he asks. “They don’t need published reports. They need results.”

It’s all good and proper that this campaign has been about City Hall’s finances and the state of the TTC. These are critically important to the city as a whole, and no less to “priority neighbourhoods” like Jane-Finch. (I took the TTC to the debate from Yonge and Eglinton, just to remind myself how the neighbourhood fits into the city. Operating with unimpeachable efficiency, it took 75 minutes.)

But the Toronto-the-bad issues haven’t gone away, and they aren’t going away. It’s not hard to believe Mr. Ford might be rather good at dealing with them. In any event, I think we might have been better off debating them instead of, say, bike lanes — which, by comparison, don’t matter even a little bit.